The poet swiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A few drops of wine had fallen on the cross of Santiago embroidered on the breast of his black sleeved doublet.
"I believe," he said, "that Philip the Great is wiping his ass with it."
"That itself is an honor," Licenciado Calzas argued.
Don Francisco appropriated another jug.
"In that case"—there was a pause as he drank—"the honor is to his royal ass. The paper was good, a half-ducat a ream. And I wrote it in my best hand."
He was in a foul mood, for these were not good times for him, not for his prose or his poetry, or his finances. Only a few weeks earlier, the fourth Philip had had to lift the decree—first prison and then exile—that had been weighing over Quevedo since the fall from favor, two or three years before, of his friend and protector the Duque de Osuna. At last reinstated, Don Francisco had been able to return to Madrid, but he was in a monetary fast. His petition to the king, soliciting his former pension of four hundred escudos owed for service in Italy—he had been a spy in Venice, a fugitive, and two of his companions had been executed—had been answered with silence. That had made him more furious than ever, and his fury nourished his bad humor and his wit, which went hand in hand . . . and contributed to new problems.
"Patientia lenietur princeps," Domine Perez said, consoling him. "Patience placates the sovereign."
"Well, Reverend Father, it does not placate me one whit."
The Jesuit looked around with a preoccupied air. Every time one of this group found himself in difficulty, it fell to the domine to speak to his character and his conduct, as befitted his position as man of the Church. From time to time, he absolved his friends sub conditioner without their requesting it. Behind their backs, the captain said. Less devious than the norm among members of his order, the domine took seriously the honored obligation to moderate squabbles. He was full of life, a good theologian, tolerant of human weaknesses, benevolent, and placid in the extreme. He made generous allowances for his fellow beings, and his church was crowded with women who came to confess their sins, drawn by his reputation for being generous at the tribunal of penitence.
As for the regulars at the Tavern of the Turk, in his presence no one spoke of dark deeds or of women; that was the condition upon which his company was based: tolerance, and friendship. Quarrels and affairs, he often said, I will deal with in the confessional. And when his ecclesiastical superiors reproached him for passing time in the tavern with poets and swordsmen, he responded that saints save themselves, while sinners must be sought out. I will add on his behalf that he barely tasted his wine and I never heard him speak ill of anyone. Which in the Spain of that day— and today as well—was something unheard of in a cleric.
"Let us be prudent, Senor Quevedo," he added affectionately that day, after his comment in Latin. "You, sir, are not in a position to speak ill of certain things aloud."
Don Francisco looked at the priest, adjusting his eyeglasses. "I? Speak ill? You err, Domine. I do not speak ill, I merely state the truth."
And then he stood, and turned toward the rest of those in the tavern, reciting, in his educated, sonorous, and clear voice:
"I shall speak out, despite appeals.
You touch first your lips, and then your brow
Counseling silence or threatening fear.
Should not a man hold courage dear?
Must he not feel the thing he says?
Must he not say the thing he feels? "
Juan Vicuna and Licenciado Calzas applauded, and El Tuerto Fadrique nodded gravely. Captain Alatriste looked at Don Francisco with a broad, melancholy smile, which the poet returned. Domine Perez, acknowledging that the question the poet had posed was unanswerable, concentrated on his watered muscatel. The poet took up the charge again, now approaching it via a sonnet that he kept revising.
"I looked upon the walls of my fatherland, Though once strong, now tumbling down "
Caridad la Lebrijana came and took away the empty jars, asking for moderation before swishing away with a walk that captured all eyes except those of the domine, still absorbed in his muscatel, and of Don Francisco, sunk in combat with silent ghosts.
"I walked into my home and saw
A ruin that nothing could assuage;
My staff, more curved and battered.
My sword, now dulled by age,
In all a memory of death:
Nothing was left...
nothing that mattered."
Some strangers strolled into the tavern, and Diego Alatriste placed a hand on the poet's arm, calming him. "The memory of death!" Don Francisco repeated in conclusion, lost in his own thoughts. He sat, however, and accepted the new jar the captain offered him.
In truth, Senor Quevedo's days at court were spent with orders of arrest or exile hanging over his head. Although occasionally he bought a house whose administrator milked him of the rents, that may have been the reason he had never wanted a fixed residence in Madrid, and tended to take lodgings in public inns. Truces from his adversaries, like periods of prosperity, were brief for this singular man, the hobgoblin of his enemies and delight of his friends, who one moment might be mingling with nobles and scholars and the next scrabbling in his purse for the last maravedi. Changes of fortune ... which so loves to change, and almost never for the better.
"We have no choice but to fight," the poet added after a few seconds.
His tone was pensive, as if for himself only; one eye was
swimming in wine, and the other had gone down for the last time. Alatriste, still holding his friend's arm and bending over the table, smiled with affectionate sadness. "Against whom, Don Francisco?"
The captain seemed almost not to expect an answer. Quevedo raised one finger. His eyeglasses had slipped from his nose and were dangling from their cord, nearly dipping into his wine.
"Against stupidity, evil, superstition, envy, and ignorance," he enunciated slowly, and as he spoke, he appeared to regard his reflection on the surface of the liquid. "Which is to say, against all Spain. Against everything."
I was listening from where I was sitting by the door, intrigued and uneasy. I intuited that behind Don Francisco's bad-humored words lay dark reasons that he himself could not comprehend, but that went beyond simple tantrums and sour character. I, at my tender age, still did not know that it is possible to speak harshly about what we love, precisely because of that love, and with the moral authority that love bestows upon us. Later, I was able to understand that the state of affairs in Spain was very painful to Don Francisco. A Spain still formidable from without, but one that despite the pomp and artifice, despite our young and charming king, our national pride and our heroic battles,
Spain had begun to doze, trusting in the gold and silver that the galleons brought from the Indies. But all that gold and silver disappeared into the hands of the aristocracy, and of lazy, corrupt, and unproductive officials and clergy who squandered it in vain undertakings such as financing the costly war renewed in Flanders, where providing a pike, that is, a new pikeman or soldier, cost an eye and a leg.
Even the Low Dutch whom we were fighting sold us their manufactured products and made commercial deals right in Cadiz, acquiring the precious metals that our ships—which had to outmaneuver pirates—brought from the lands to the west. Aragonese and Catalans were shielded by their laws; Portugal was patched together; commerce was in the hands of foreigners; finances were the purview of Genoese bankers; and no one worked except the wretched peasants, exploited by the tax collectors of the aristocracy and the king. And in the midst of all that corruption and madness, moving against the course of history, like a beautiful, terrifying animal that still slashed and clawed yet at the heart was eaten by a malignant tumor, our poor Spain was worm-eaten inside, condemned to an inexorable decadence that did not escape the clear eyes of Don Francisco de Quevedo. But I, at that time, could see nothing but the daring of his words, and I kept looking anxiously outside, expecting at any moment to see the catchpoles of the corregidor appear with a new warrant for Don Francisco's arrest, to punish his arrogant lack of caution.